5 Stupid Juries That Prove the Justice System Is Broken

Due to recent events, people are once again wondering if this whole "trial by jury" thing is bullshit. On one hand, one of the biggest advantages of Western democracy is the right to be judged by a jury of your peers. On the other hand, your "peers" are a bunch of people who are missing work who are generally annoyed and/or bored with the process, and who may or may not be crazy. So it's no surprise that this system goes wrong from time to time. It's just surprising how wrong it goes.

#5. A Jury Consults a Ouija Board for a Verdict

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Don't get us wrong: If Ouija boards could actually be used to consult with the dead in the afterlife, they would be useful as hell for solving murders (or at least finding corpses). But their validity as a forensic tool is actually not recognized by modern science.

Photos.comCootie catchers are still totally legit, though.

But don't tell that to a jury in the U.K., which was having some trouble deliberating on the case of Stephen Young, who was accused of murdering a couple as part of an insurance scam in the '90s. As is typical when a jury can't reach a verdict, the judge had them sequestered in a hotel room overnight to sort their shit out. But at some point that night, they got a bright idea and whipped out a Ouija board, figuring they might get some answers if they just asked the murder victims directly.

In their defense (or not), they were pretty drunk -- the jury took advantage of the "all expenses paid" component of the sequestration, and things started to go awry when somebody located the liquor cabinet. So it's true that four of the jurors were absolutely OK with summoning the dead via Ouija, but they were so liquored up that they would probably have agreed to praying over some goat entrails.

Photos.com"Room service says the best they can do is some chicken livers and fish bones."

Anyway, reportedly the four jurors sat down in the dark with their hands on an upturned glass and asked the spirit world for guidance. A ghost identifying itself as Harry Fuller, one of the murder victims, guided the glass over the Ouija board and spelled out the words "vote guilty tomorrow." Nailed it!

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images"Y'know, now that the mescalines wearing off this seems like a terrible idea."

Of course, when the court found out that the guilty verdict was decided from the results of a 12-year-old's birthday party game, they discharged the jury and started all over again, putting Young back on trial with explicit instructions that poltergeists are only to be consulted if they've been sworn in as witnesses.

#4. A Juror Seduces the Accused

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Obviously the biggest part of jury selection is filtering out bias -- if a celebrity is on trial, they're not going to put the president of his fan club on the jury. So being a good juror means both remaining impartial and not giving any outward appearance of bias. Such as, say, fucking the defendant during the trial.

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images"What's the stance on 'handies' in the restroom?"

In 1995, the notorious Canadian gangster (yes, there are Canadian gangsters) Peter Gill was arrested and in court facing some very serious charges for gangland murders and drug running. After the case began, one of the jurors, Gillian Guess, evidently thought that murder and drug running were totally hot, because she immediately hooked up with him in a hotel room.

Now, Guess did state later that she thought Gill was one of the lawyers, so she was probably confused about why everyone else in the room seemed mad at him. But even after discovering that the man she was bumping uglies with was actually the murderous defendant, she continued locking eyes with him by day across crime scene photos and impassioned witness testimonies, and shacking up with him by night.

Creatas/Creatas/Getty ImagesThe story would go on to inspire three Lifetime movies and two Skinemax ones.

She didn't even try to hide the affair, either, telling her sister, her best friend, even her teenage daughter that she was intoxicated by this married boy toy/crime lord 10 years her junior. Unsurprisingly, Guess voted to acquit him, and after getting the rest of the jury on board, Gill walked free.

After the authorities discovered the affair, Guess became the first person accused of sexing a defendant while sitting on his jury, a crime so idiotic that they didn't even have a name for it yet. Her defense was that she just didn't think that it would affect her decision. Unfortunately, she couldn't find anyone on her own jury to bone, so they sent her to prison for 18 months.

But if you think that's the most inappropriate sex act in the history of the legal system, we have a pretty close contender ...

#3. A Juror Gets Aroused by the Victim's Testimony

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There can't be many more awful jobs in the legal system than juror on a case about sexual abuse of underage victims. You have to sit there and listen to every little graphic detail, unable to block it out because, you know, it could all turn out to be relevant to the verdict. So it was no surprise when, in a New Zealand case, a juror told the judge that he'd been bothered by the details, which prompted the judge to at one point send the jury home early.

Keith Brofsky/Photodisc/Getty Images"Why are you sitting there? We said you can leave."
"Uh, yeah, I'm going to need a minute ..."

But that juror later confided to his peers that, in fact, the problem was that he'd been turned on by the victims' testimony. Wait, there's more! Because while it's already hard to see how the man thought that admitting to his problem was in any way going to turn out well, he didn't stop there. He turned the jury room into a serious "too much information" session when he described how he'd been wearing a condom to court in an attempt to cope with it. So ... when he said "turned on," he was kind of understating it.

Medioimages/Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty Images"There's a reason I needed three bathroom breaks and a handful of quarters."

Another juror, likely feeling more than a little freaked out about what had been happening under the desk while they tried to focus on legal matters, took the issue to the judge, who decided that getting horny over the details of a crime is probably a conflict of interest and threw the case out on the basis of history's most inappropriate boner.